Late submissions and extensions in Inspera Assessment

This feature is under development and currently can only be used for non-exam assessments that do not allow multiple submissions and do not have a duration set. It is NOT to be used for exams.

There are PITFALLS to consider in using this setting

• Marking.  If you use this setting, you cannot start marking until the test end time, which is the late submission date.  There are workarounds for this, but they are probably not suitable for large courses.  It may be less work just to give students individual end times if they have a pre-approved extension, or just reopen the submission for individual students and not use the late submission setting. 
• Calculation of penalties.  Application of penalties is not yet available in Inspera.  Because the overall mark in Inspera is a sum of all individual question marks, there is also no way to manually apply an overall late penalty to an assessment in Inspera.  The recommended practice is to use the Explanation box in Inspera to show the student how any penalty has been calculated, and manually adjust the mark in Grade Centre. See “Late penalties” below for the recommended practice to deal with this.

Assessments in Inspera can be setup with a primary submission deadline and a late submission deadline.  This means students can submit late without the need for staff to intervene and provide individual student extensions. Late submissions will be marked as late, and students are warned if they are commencing or submitting the assessment after the due date.

Instructions:

1. In Deliver, check Enable late submissions checkbox. A new set of options Primary submission deadline will be displayed.

2. In the Test end time set the late submission time, i.e. the time at which the assessment closes for late submissions.
3. In the Primary submission deadline set the time, by which the students should submit the assessment to be considered on time.
4. Check Show countdown timer during late submission period to show the students how much time they have until they lose access to the test.

Identifying late submissions

1. Open the assessment in Monitor.

2. Click on the Columns icon.
3. Check Late submission checkbox.

4. Late submissions can then be identified by checking this column for True.

Allowing on-time submissions to be marked before late submission deadline

If you need to commence marking the on-time submissions before the late submissions have come in, there’s an additional setting you will need to change in Deliver.

1. Open your assessment in Deliver.
2. In Grading workflow select Confirm each candidate individually.

WARNING: If this setting is not changed, you will need to wait until the final (late) submission deadline has passed before any of the submissions (on time and late) can be marked. This is why you need to make a considered choice about the practicality of using this setting. There is an administrative overhead for your markers if you use the setting, which in large courses may not be practical. Once you select Confirm each candidate individually on an assessment, you CAN NOT change this, even if all your students have submitted and you modify the end time on the test, which would allow you to start marking earlier.

Marking experience

When marking assessments with the enabled Confirm each candidate individually setting, several differences to the default setting Confirm all candidates at once will be observed:

1. At the top of the page, the following message will be displayed Ready for marking (test is still open). It means that marking can commence even though there may still students still completing the assessment (e.g., late submissions).
2. There is no Confirm button at the top of the page, which would normally be used to confirm all marks at once.
3. The Confirm button appears next to each student in the Overview list. Each one of these buttons must be clicked individually to confirm the students’ marks.

Check More details on confirming marks guide (by Inspera).

Late penalties

There is presently no option to automatically apply penalties for late submissions.  Because the overall mark in Inspera is a sum of all individual question marks, there is also no way to manually apply an overall late penalty to an assessment in Inspera.

The recommended practice is to use the Explanation box in Inspera to show the student how any penalty has been calculated, and manually adjust the mark in Grade Centre.  If you do not use the Explanation box to set out the calculation, the marks students see in Inspera and in Grade Centre will be different and will potentially cause confusion.

For example:
•    Marks = 30/40
•    20% penalty for 2 days late submission
•    Total Mark you will see in Grade Centre will therefore be 24/20.

Student experience

If a student commences or submits an assessment after the primary submission deadline has passed, the following notice will be displayed on the assessment dashboard:

If a student commences the assessment during the primary submission period, the countdown timer in the top-left corner changes to a warning that reads, “Late submission in less than one minute” once the timer reaches one minute or less: